Mono on Linux: Apache or Nginx

ask yourself WHAT the application will be doing

lots of file I/O? well then apache's threading model is just fine, file I/O is blocking

long-running connections with clients? then nginx's event model is more appropriate, network I/O can be nonblocking

the most honest answer is that its unlikely you will be hitting the architectural limits of ANY webserver. just use whatever you are most comfortable with. the "overhead" arguments directed against apache's thread model are only meaningful in high-traffic scenarios.

Sergey Sysoev -- the author of nginx -- releases patches quite often. The webserver is very nice, and is capable of effectively running anything with the help of FCGI, either PHP or Mono or whatever. Nginx is also exteremely efficient in serving static content, and uses very little memory for all these keep-alives and slow ones. Additionally, it has nice features&modules available to resist DDoS attacks.

But look, every scripting language is slow. If performance is the main concern, maybe you'll better try to create a FCGI app in C?

Cheers! :)

I personally replaced my Nginx setup with Cherokee

So far everything is running just as fast and I have a web interface on top of that. It also support Mono.

@ABrown: You're wrong on the point that ASP.Net is interpreted.

Applications/websites can be written in C# for example which are then compiled to an intermediate bytecode (IL). That's phase 1.

When a user initially visits the website, the byte code is then compiled to machine code.

Subsequent visits to the website invoke the machine code (it is not parsed or interpreted, it is executed natively).